RE: Can't access forum without VPN who do I talk to get my IP whitelisted?

oh - and I should have mentioned that the site was down for a few hours on Sunday morning (USA time, east coast). It was a scheduled maintenance by the company on their servers, and it wasn't expected to take things down - but it did.

That might have been the issue.

There's also another maintenance window for later this month, on Saturday 20th, in the early hours as well.